Each company a home service platform acquires brings its own invoices, vendor bills, payroll records, and customer accounts. As the number of locations grows, so does the amount of paperwork that has to be entered, checked, and filed each month. Many platforms add outsourced back office support so the in-house finance team can handle more locations with the same process.
In a home service company, back office work usually includes:
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics describes this kind of work in its profile of bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks, whose duties include posting transactions, recording payments, and checking figures and reports for accuracy.
BLS projects that employment of bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks will decline 6% from 2025 to 2035, while about 144,100 openings will still come up each year. The agency expects all of those openings to come from replacing workers who move to other jobs or retire.
The same BLS profile notes that these clerks often work extra hours at the end of the fiscal year, during tax season, and during audits. For a platform with several locations, these periods fall at the same time for every location.
Platforms that pay subcontractors across several locations file Form 1099-NEC for each one who meets the reporting threshold. According to the IRS instructions for Forms 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC, Form 1099-NEC must be filed by January 31, and the reporting threshold for most of these payments is $2,000 for tax years beginning after 2025.
Collecting W-9 forms when a subcontractor is first paid, and keeping payment records by vendor throughout the year, makes the January filing simpler when several acquired companies have their own subcontractor lists.
Acquired companies come with years of past records. The IRS explains how long businesses should keep records. In most cases, records that support a tax return are kept for 3 years, and employment tax records are kept for at least 4 years after the tax is due or paid, whichever is later.
Some platforms scan and file older records from each acquired company into one shared system so they can be found by location, year, and document type.
After an acquisition, the finance team usually moves the new company’s records onto the platform’s standard setup. Common steps include:
Outsourced staff can handle the data entry and document work in each of these steps, following written instructions from the platform’s finance team.
Platforms that outsource back office tasks usually keep financial decisions in-house. A common split looks like this:
| In-house finance team | Outsourced back office team |
|---|---|
| Approving bills, refunds, and credits | Entering bills and matching them to purchase orders |
| Setting payment terms and collection policy | Sending invoices and payment reminders |
| Reviewing and closing the books each month | Preparing records and reports for review |
| Filing tax returns | Collecting W-9 forms and organizing 1099 records |
| Choosing the chart of accounts | Entering transactions using the chart provided |
The exact split depends on the size of the finance team and how many locations the platform runs.
Avidus provides back office support for home service companies in the United States and Canada, including multi-location operators. Tasks include invoicing support, data entry, estimate follow-up, and confirmation calls. Our team is based in the Philippines and is trained on your process before starting work. Staff work inside the accounting and field service software your platform already uses, and approvals stay with your team.
If you would like to see what outsourced back office support could cost for the number of locations you run, the Avidus calculator gives you an estimate.